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Abbreviated pundit roundup: Path to passage of GOP tax bill built with lies and hypocrisy

By Georgia Logothetis
Friday Dec 01, 2017 · 6:45 AM CST



We begin today’s roundup with Paul Krugman’s analysis of how much the Trump administration and Republicans are lying to push their tax bill through:

Mnuchin has repeatedly claimed the existence of a Treasury report that — unlike every independent, nonpartisan assessment — found that these plans would pay for themselves, increasing growth and hence revenues so much that the deficit wouldn’t rise. But there is no such report, and never has been; Treasury staffers weren’t even asked to study the issue.

Also on Thursday, John McCain — who has delivered sanctimonious lectures on the importance of “regular order” in the Senate — declared his support for the G.O.P. tax bill. Remember, Senate leaders rushed this bill to the floor without holding any hearings or soliciting expert testimony (and tax policy is an area where you really, really need to hear from experts, lawyers and accountants even more than economists). In fact, at the time McCain declared his support, some key provisions were still secret, so they could be presented for a vote with no time for debate.

McCain declared that he had made his decision after “careful consideration.” Careful consideration of what? He didn’t even wait for an analysis of the bill’s economic impact by the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’s own scorekeeper — the only official assessment, since the Trump administration was, as I said, lying when it claimed to have its own analysis.

Here’s Heather Long’s analysis at The Washington Post:

[O]n Thursday, the calculation didn’t go the way they had long wanted. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation ruled that the tax plan Republicans had hoped to move swiftly through the Senate would add $1 trillion to the deficit — even after accounting for the positive impact from economic growth.

The announcement helped halt progress on the tax effort and presented a stark challenge to a core tenet of the Republican Party’s economic philosophy.

Paul Waldman at The Week slams down a common lie on the right that the ACA was passed in a similar manner:

One can't help but remember that Republicans so often complained that the Affordable Care Act was "rammed through" Congress, calling it a terrible offense against democracy itself. Of course, the truth was that the ACA was debated for an entire year and was the subject of dozens of hearings in both houses featuring testimony from hundreds of witnesses, not to mention bipartisan forums and a floor debate that went on for weeks. Or if you want to just talk about tax reform, as Michael Tomasky points out, the last time Congress did a major overhaul of the tax system, "The House Ways and Means Committee held hearings for months and took testimony from 450 witnesses. The Senate Finance Committee held a full month of hearings." The whole process took a year and a half — which is what you'd expect when Congress tries to do something so complicated.

But if you want to see a bill rammed through, right now Republicans are showing us how it's done.

At The Nation, David Dayen calls the latest tax plan the dumbest one yet offered up by Republicans:

The negotiations over the Trump tax overhaul have moved from tragedy to farce. You could let monkeys bang on typewriters for several millennia and not come up with an idea as profoundly stupid as what Senate Republicans added Tuesday to appease one of their own members. [...]

We don’t have the specific details yet, and probably won’t until tomorrow. But just based on the concept, I can unreservedly say that [the trigger] provision would make the name “Cut Cut Cut Act” seem like the work of Albert Einstein.

Amber Philips at The Washington Post points out that the GOP is desparate to pass anything they can call a tax bill:

Republicans are racing to pass this tax bill despite the fact they don't know what will for sure be in it, nor how it would impact economic growth, nor how tax cuts directed mostly at the wealthy will play politically in next year's midterm elections.

So then, why the rush to pass it? Because, this: “Failure’s not an option,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in the halls of Congress on Wednesday.

In other words, Republicans have come to the conclusion failure is worse than passing an unpopular tax bill. Way worse.

In the breath before, Graham had indicated he'll take pretty much anything that can remotely be called a tax bill: “Susan [Collins]’s got a concern, it’s a real legitimate concern. Ron Johnson’s got a concern. There’s a deficit concern. It’s like making a cocktail. If you’ve got to add more of this and less of that, I’m fine.”

Turning from the chaos in Congress to the chaos in the State Department, The New York Times editorial board expresses concerns with rumored Secretary of State replacements Tom Cotton or Mike Pompeo:

Rex Tillerson’s tenure as secretary of state has been tumultuous, damaging to American foreign policy and his department. And, one can reasonably speculate, more unpleasant and unsatisfying than not for Mr. Tillerson himself. [...]

These appointments would add two more white men to a cabinet dominated by them, and two more senior officials with military backgrounds to a national security team that is already top-heavy with them. Mr. Cotton is a decorated Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mr. Pompeo is a retired Army officer who graduated from West Point. Military experience can be valuable, but not to the point of overwhelming the civilians.

In the final analysis, the people who fill cabinet jobs are a reflection of the president, his values and his priorities. And, in the end, the problems with American foreign policy arise from that very same person.

Here’s Dexter Filkins take at The New Yorker:

[I]t’s tempting to buy into the popular notion that Tillerson (along with Secretary of Defense James Mattis; the President’s chief of staff, John Kelly; and the national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster) is one of the “adults in the room,” preventing the President from acting even more egregiously than he already has. What has Trump been prevented from doing? We don’t know what we don’t know, but the evidence is not encouraging. Tillerson has been humiliated by President Trump; even so, he has doggedly carried on with the President’s most radical policies.

On a final note, here’s Damon Linker’s piece on how to handle our Twitter troll president:

Nearly a year into Trump's presidency, what are we to make of his increasingly unhinged tweets? As a journalist, I thought to myself, "If you want to ignore the president's tweets, go right ahead. But we're in the news business. When the president says something, it's news, even if it's absurd, insulting, or a form of incitement." But after a year of Trumpian madness, I'm no longer so sure. Practically, I have a hard time imagining individual Americans ignoring the president's outrageous tweets, let alone news organizations actively deciding not to report on them. But that doesn't mean the country and the world wouldn't be vastly better off if we did.

Trump's tweets don't advance a consistent policy agenda. They don't make a cogent case for the administration's position on this or that topic. They don't articulate a direction for the nation's foreign policy or communicate a coherent message for the wider world. They exist solely to antagonize, provoke, and polarize. Only his most extreme, uncritical admirers like these outrageous assertions. Everyone else ends up appalled — and that negative response ends up being a good part of why those extreme, uncritical admirers liked them in the first place. It's all about reaction, all the way down.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/12/1/1720093/-Abbreviated-pundit-roundup-Path-to-passage-of-GOP-tax-bill-built-with-lies-and-hypocrisy